Typed View Controllers from storyboard

[psartzetakis]

Hi,😀
I have introduced something that personally annoys me, if you find that interesting and you believe that we can include a solution on that issue through PresenterKit we can discuss it further.

The problem

When you bring view controllers from the storyboard usually you do something like that:

let colorViewController = self.storyboard?.instantiateViewController(withIdentifier: "identifier") as! ColorViewController

The thing that I don't like is that part:

as! ColorViewController
or
as? ColorViewController

A suggestion

I believe that it would be much nicer to wrap this functionality into something nicer. Perhaps something like:

extension UIStoryboard {
    func instatiate<T: UIViewController>(type: T.Type, with identifier: String) -> T {
        return instantiateViewController(withIdentifier: identifier) as! T
    }
}

As a result we could do something like that:

let colorViewController = storyboard?.instatiate(type: ColorViewController.self, with: "identifier")

A different suggestion (not that good though..)

Note: - personally I use most of the times as identifier the same name as the class name, so it would suit me something like that:

extension UIStoryboard {
    func instatiate<T: UIViewController>(type: T.Type, identifier: String? = nil) -> T {
        let identifier = identifier ?? "\(type.self)"
        return instantiateViewController(withIdentifier: identifier) as! T
    }
}

So I can use it like that:

let colorViewController = storyboard?.instatiate(type: ColorViewController.self)

But: I don't thing that could be a good idea since it can be misleading ..

What do you think?

[jessesquires]

Thanks @psartzetakis ! 😄

Sounds cool to me, but it's probably out-of-scope for this library, which is focused on presentation.

I think this would fit better in @AliSoftware's https://github.com/AliSoftware/Reusable

He has something similar to this:
https://github.com/AliSoftware/Reusable/blob/master/Sources/Storyboard/StoryboardSceneBased.swift

But I like what you've proposed a lot. 💯

[psartzetakis]

@jessesquires Thanks for the feedback! 😄